


Little Heart

by evelyn_b



Category: Emily of New Moon - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Chores, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:43:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2807981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evelyn_b/pseuds/evelyn_b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time Juliet was born, Elizabeth had never been a girl. Elizabeth and Juliet have a conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gingerschnapps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingerschnapps/gifts).



By the time Juliet was born, Elizabeth had never been a girl. She had been alive for twenty-four years, and each of them as sensible and featureless as the last, as far as anyone outside New Moon could figure.

“I think you were born grown up,” Juliet's mother said to her once, smiling her nervous, lazy smile, one of those evenings she sat tatting lace by candlelight while Elizabeth knitted and Laura read. Two years younger than Elizabeth, a year older than Laura, the little second cousin who was to be their stepmother had arrived at the farm without preamble, almost without explanation: a nervous stranger-sister forgotten until this moment, pasted imperfectly into their midst like the Queen in a trick photograph. Elizabeth could not take her seriously as a mother, or even as anyone's wife, but she let her pretend to be their friend, and she gave her the benefit of her long maturity.

Elizabeth had spent her childhood pretending to have been born grown up. When the settlement girls met at the raw pine door of the new church to whisper and toss their heads, she made herself feel sorry for them, and for all those children with the bad luck to have been born children, with ruddy foolish fathers and mothers who were nothing like pillars. She walked out of each day and into the next without looking back like Lot's wife should have done, and imagined herself as she wanted to be: old and serene and far beyond them.

 In time, it came true. The days wore down behind her to a white, featureless plane, and as far as she could remember or think of she was as she had always been. “Set in her ways,” was what Blair Water people called it. Her own Aunt Nancy, when Elizabeth was fifteen, said, “I never heard of a girl so set in her ways as you.” She clicked her mouth open and shook her head as if it were a pity. But Elizabeth had never been a girl, and never wanted to be, and if there were such a thing as a path of righteousness, or even a path of common sense, then it must be a fine thing to be set, like a faithful clock, in the ways of New Moon Farm.

When she was really a child, Elizabeth had done a thing so bad no one would speak of it directly. Her people said she had never been “the same” since Jimmy's accident, that she “never did forgive herself” – but that was nonsense. Elizabeth had always been the same, and there was none righteous nor ever could be since the days of Eve, so what difference did they think it made?

. . .  


The little stepmother died in the spare room at New Moon, a few days after Juliet was born. Juliet had inherited her long eyelashes and something of her nervous energy – her youth, if youth could be inherited, and the uncertain way she wore her gaiety, as though it were a bonnet she had been told but could not trust was flattering. Father had left her lessons to “the girls” until she was old enough for her faults to be apparent; now he hovered over her sometimes when she did her reading in the kitchen, and sometimes he ignored her; Elizabeth thought he resented her because she was pretty and clever or because her being born had killed her mother, or because she was Juliet. There was never any way to tell what Father thought, unless it suited him that you should know, and then he beamed it on you like the lighthouse at Malvern Point, so there was nothing else.

Elizabeth filled each hour to its corners. She learned to bake in the temperamental stove, and taught Laura and Ruth lace-making and the invisible Murray stitch, and walked with her clean, long stride over winter roads carrying meat jelly to the sick and invalid. She watched the stores and the dairy, kept the floorboards sanded clean and quietly took over management of the farm after the bad harvest of '67, paying down debts in secret while Father made threats and promises in town. These were her ways. They exhausted the present and absorbed all else she may or may not have been, writing usefulness and thrift in her book of life, so that her sins were crowded out one by one, and only the ways remained.

 . . .

Juliet slouched in chairs it should not have been possible to slouch in. She flopped bonelessly against the unforgiving slats and let her bright head loll against her shoulders like a baby's. Her sea-green ribbons nearly licked the kitchen floor; she dug the heels of her cream-and-brown boots into the old boards as though trying to launch herself entirely backwards for reasons Elizabeth neither could nor cared to fathom.

“Why is everything so simply horrible?” she said.

“There's a nice greeting for you.” Elizabeth thumped a bowl of glistening clean potatoes on the kitchen table. “I suppose everything seems bad when you can't see past your nose. Cut up some of these potatoes and put them in the pot, if you can see through your tears.”

Juliet laughed. When she laughed, her whole long body rippled like a brook. She had a self-indulgent way of moving when Father was out of the house that she never affected when he was home, even when he was in the fields and she was in the sitting-room. Elizabeth never knew whether she should chide her for it or not. “Aren't you even going to ask me what I'm miserable about?”

“I'm sure I don't care,” said Elizabeth mildly. She sat down beside the potatoes and arranged her basket of peas in her lap to shell. “Sit up straight; you'll be a hunchback before you're twenty. The paring knife is in the bowl.”

“I don't see how you can expect me to sit up straight when I'm dead inside,” said Juliet cheerfully. At sixteen, she was round like Ruth, but taller, and quick where Ruth was still, with earnest hazy blue eyes and a round face and round, full arms. She arranged herself into a stern parody of Elizabeth's posture, sank amiably and deliberately to one side, and straightened again. “Do you know what I love best about you, Elizabeth? You _never_ ask me what I'm thinking.” She began to peel a long spiral from one of the potatoes. “Laura would have said, poor baby darling chick-baby lambkins, tell me what's wrong, and then I would have to think of something to tell her right away or she would think it was the worst thing possible, and Father would say-- oh, I don't know, what are you snivelling about now, girlie, and I'd have to think of something else again that was proper to be snivelling about. And Mr. Adams _always_ expects me to say something clever in school now. Did you ever have a teacher like that? It's horribly trying. He always _looks_ at me significantly, and the whole school has to stop and turn around, and there I am, without a thought in my head.”

“I expect he has high expectations for you.”

Juliet shook her bright head, like a horse tossing away a cloud of flies. “No, I wish he wouldn't. I honestly do. It just makes me clam up like. . . _you_ know, like _clams.”_ She lopped the naked potato into thick slices and dropped them in the big saucepan with a pleasant golden thump. _“_ But _you_ never ask, even when I want you to. So what happens is, I always want to tell you everything.”

“Well, don't. I don't care what you think as long as you behave properly.”

“That's exactly it,” said Juliet. “It's so horribly freeing. You know, I don't even care about that silly album. I know you _think_ I'm horribly shallow and only want things because other girls have them, but it isn't that at all.”

 Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. The month before, Juliet had come to her – very properly and politely, it must be said – to ask if she could have one of those “albums” for a scrap-book. The girls at school had started a fancy for advertising cards and autographs, and Juliet had held out against the fad for nearly a year with Murraylike endurance. Elizabeth thought it a useless and self-indulgent fad, and Father detested it simply because it _was_ a fad and a girl's fad at that, wholly beyond his sympathy, and there was no money to spare at New Moon for paper, anyway. She told Juliet so. A little later she called on Ruth, and Ruth, who was sentimental about Juliet as all the younger Murrays were then, bought the pinkest, laciest album at the Shrewsbury paper-and-sundries, and allowed for Juliet to visit her in town the following Friday. Juliet had filled it with dried flowers and leaf-rubbings, and the Pears Soap cards with babies on them, and when her older niece Edith, Wallace's girl and the closest thing Juliet had to a close friend, came to visit from Summerside, she took it down to the sitting-room to show off. They were reading some of the comic verses Annette McKay had scrawled over one of the pages of flower-seed cards when Father came in from walking the orchard and there was what Ruth called “a scene”: questions without answers, a cloud and a shadow. He tore the book in half; Edith had shouted something shrill and unwanted, Juliet tried to stop her too late; in the end Edith and Juliet huddled in silence in Juliet's bed in broad daylight, and in the morning Edith went home early all red-faced and solemn, and now had not send Juliet a letter or card in five days.

“Edith is a very spoiled girl,” said Elizabeth.

“Oh, please don't make it horrible. She already never wants to see me again, and you don't _know_. It isn't our business if she's spoiled or not, is it? It's Wallace's business. If I'm spoiled, it's different. Of course you should scold me all you want. _Am_ I spoiled?”

Elizabeth pressed her mouth into a narrow straight line. Juliet was spoiled by Murray standards, conspicuously austere by the standard of the Blair Water Sunday school. “A little," she said. "Not so much as you act sometimes. We were far more lenient with you than Father was with us, though I dare say you've turned out better than you might have.”

“I don't _feel_ spoiled," said Juliet,  "but I guess that only proves how spoiled I am, doesn't it? I _wish_ Edith would say something to me. You know, Edith is almost the only person in the world I can talk to, I mean who understands me. I _like_ the girls at school, but none of them really _understands_ things, only Almira a little, but she doesn't like _me,_ only she pretends to and it's horrible. I think she feels like _I_ don't really understand things either, which is a sad thing, because we both want to be understood so badly. Did you ever feel like that?”

Elizabeth ignored the question without pretending to understand it.

“Edith is family,” she said. “She'll have to visit whether she wants to or not.”

“No -- that makes it worse! I don't want her  _forced_ to come back. Honestly, if I thought having a scrapbook was such a horrible vale of horribleness I would never have asked in the first place. I truly wouldn't.” Juliet picked up a potato, tossed it and caught it and dropped it again. It rolled unevenly toward the stove. “I hope there won't be a ruction. I hate ructions so _infinitely_ much. Why can't we just get along? Is Wallace going to be horrible about it, do you think?”

 “If you don't stop using that word,” said Elizabeth, without looking up from the peas, “I'll turn you out to clean the eavestroughs”

Juliet took a great gulp of a breath, as though she meant to sigh heavily and flop down on the floor itself, but Elizabeth continued calmly shelling peas without so much as a glance in her direction, and she thought better of it. She wiped the potato on her apron and put both her elbows squarely on the kitchen table, leaning her whole weight on them so that the table creaked under her, until Elizabeth frowned with her forehead and she reverted to regulation straightness.

Juliet did not think of herself as lonely unless she fell into a mood. Most of the time, the other girls liked her. They played games at school like Four Pips, where you licked four seeds and stuck them to your forehead, and counted out before they fell onto a map chalked on slate or scratched in the ground that showed your husband's first initial, how many years before you married, whether you would live in a palace, house, caravan, or shack, and the number you counted to was how many children you would have. Juliet kept one of her pips stuck to the count of two hundred once by wrinkling her forehead, and landed it smack on C for Caravan. Abigail McKay said behaviour like that showed a depraved nature. She was friendly with many girls but Father was odd about guests at New Moon and about letting Juliet go to call on "strangers," so the friendships stayed tentative year after year, or came unstuck. The one time Juliet brought Almira Kelly to New Moon he had walked past them so often and made so many complaints about Almira's dress and posture and hair and expression that Almira left before tea and never asked to come again. He told Juliet it was for the best. “She's a slovenly little thing, and the Kellys are bad seeds,” he said. “I'd rather you had no friends than bad ones, and you will, too, when you know something about it.” He had a reason to cut out every one of Juliet's school friends, but at the bottom of it he did not like to see young people being young. He hated the way their eyes were indistinct and glittering in their soft faces and the unfinished pitch of their voices, the way their mouths flickered between irony and incomprehension and never held still the way _he_ took care to.

Edith was different, because she was family. She was too modern and looked at her elders too straight, but exceptions could be made for Murrays. When Edith came to New Moon, they walked along the beach together, Edith with hands clasped awkwardly in front of her, Juliet with arms unevenly swinging. From time to time Juliet would run out in front and skip on the wet sand, and wait for Edith to catch up. When they were together, they wrote in the same journal and made up names for all the Blair Water and Summerside boys; when they were apart, Juliet wrote letters and Edith sent picture postcards of comic Irishmen and pelicans wearing cravats. Edith seemed very much older than Juliet sometimes, and sometimes very young.

When she was alone, Juliet liked to walk to the cliffs of Malvern Bay and remember seeing the sea for the first time. She called it remembering, though she had never lived without the sea and was only pretending. She did not imagine another life for herself, only that somehow there had never been a sea in it, and now here it was. Sometimes she pretended she was Grandmother Murray, setting her foot on land and holding fast. In the true story she and Grandfather had set sail from Scotland only a few months before (a storybook country, a few hills and a castle all in mist), but the way Juliet remembered it, she had been born on the ship called the New Moon, grown up and married Hugh Murray on the rolling waves, and never knew land until the moment her little slippered foot touched the red sand of the bay and she knew. That was how falling in love would be.

Of course, that was horribly silly.

Most of the things Juliet thought were silly.

. . .

  
“There's something I mean to talk to you about," said Elizabeth. "Don't jump like you've been caught stealing! It's nothing so terrible. Has Mr. Adams told you that your essay won a prize, or no?”

Juliet blushed and turned away, first to the floor, then to a lanky spider walking slowly up the wall beside the kitchen door. Elizabeth let her hands fall to her lap in disgust.

"You might share news with the family, instead of keeping it secret. I don't understand this need of yours to hide everything."

"I don't hide everything," said Juliet. "I hardly hide anything. I wish I could hide things."

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride," said Elizabeth automatically. "Wallace and Oliver and I – and all of us, your Aunt Nancy as well – don't get that look on your face; I'm not suggesting you drown any kittens. Mr. Adams suggested we send you to the teacher training course at Queen's. You've been offered a scholarship by the district. What do you say to that?”

Juliet see-sawed her knife into the potato and said nothing.

Elizabeth sniffed. “He said you'll likely test into the first class and skip the preliminary year. Edith is going to take a special course in literature. You can room together.”

She followed Juliet's gaze to the wall. The spider ducked into a knot-hole just above the apron hook.

“You might make a _little_ effort to seem grateful, and not turn up your nose at an education, even if it isn't some fancy school in the States.”

 Juliet stabbed her knife through her potato into the kitchen table. The potato flew apart and one half rolled onto the floor. Elizabeth snatched the knife out of her hands with wrath in her eyebrows.

 “If you're too childish not to fool with knives and spoil the table, then I don't need your help here. Put the rest of those in the bowl and tell Laura to find you something to do.”

 “You know it isn't--” Elizabeth stiffened involuntarily at the teary yowl at the bottom of Juliet's voice. She remembered how she used to put her hand over Laura's mouth when they were children. No one loves a howler, Father said, and it was all too true: she felt her love sliding away from her whenever anyone whined or cried. “How can you say I'm turning up my nose when I haven't even said a thing, when you never asked me what I wanted in the first place?”

For a moment, Elizabeth imagined putting her hand over Juliet's mouth, the way Father had done for all the children when Elizabeth was really a child, snuffing the wild sound like a candle – ssst. When that happened, imagining herself old and wise, she always thought: thank Providence I had someone to shut me up when I cried. But that was long ago, and it was impossible to imagine covering Juliet's mouth with her hand. She narrowed her eyes instead, and made quick deliberate motions with her hands, as though to demonstrate that Juliet's extravagant distress was in no way as important as ensuring the peas were shelled.

“I can't understand,” she said, “why anyone would choose to throw away the opportunity for an education simply because it was less than ideal. Teacher training is not what I would have chosen for you, but financially--”

 “Did you tell Father?”

 “--as a feasible means of continuing your education and setting aside some money for the future. I would certainly not have turned up my nose, if there had been such a thing when I was a girl. Your grandmother Murray--”

 “Oh-- darn Grandmother Murray! You _know_ if you and Wallace and everybody start threaping at Father to send me off to Charlottetown, no one will get a second's peace ever again. It was bad enough when Oliver moved away, and he's grown and married. It'll be worse than if you never said anything.”

Elizabeth felt as though she had walked into a wall. Her face took on a pained, long-suffering expression, like that of a nurse who has wrestled too long with a large and stubborn invalid. “You needn't do anything if that's how you feel,” she said. “I thought I would give you good news. I don't understand you at all.”

Juliet put her face down in a pile of potato shavings.

Elizabeth felt a surge of helpless anger. She remembered how stomach-twistingly sorry she felt as a child for Elder Simpson when he used to roll up his eyes and wheedle at God, how she wanted to put her hand over his mouth and say, get up out of that and quit that noise; can't you see it does no good? That was what Father said to her when she fell to screaming that time, so wild you might have thought it was her fallen down that well. Don't you see the thing is done, he said, and she saw it. All things had been done in the mind of God, and not a jot or tittle could be altered, and if no man loves a beggar, if no sensible mortal man can stand to be howled and pleaded at, how much less patience must God have, who is most wise, most free, most holy and absolute? There was nothing to beg of God or the well. There was the next moment and then the next in the great invisible machine of Providence.

It was that way with Juliet. She would choose one way or the other and no amount of pestering could change her. Elizabeth did not like the thought of Juliet under their father's eye another two years, or three. She did not quite like the accumulation of old maids in the house of her un-childhood. But there was no way to say that to a child of sixteen. There was hardly a way to say it to herself. She rapped on the table by Juliet's head with two fingers, up-up-UP!

“Kindly don't be disgusting,” she said sharply. “Pick up your head and stop this nonsense.” Juliet lifted her head from the table but did not look at Elizabeth. She dragged one fingernail slowly through a potato's flesh. “Father is – our father. He's older than he was, and he never did like change. But you are young, and it's not right for you not to change and grow up. Pick up your head and listen to me, Juliet. There are more important things than peace in this house. If you're bound and determined to waste a provincial scholarship and pay Mr. Adams back with ingratitude, I can't stop you, but I won't see you disgrace yourself by acting out of fear. If you want to go, I'll talk to him, and you can stay with Ruth or Wallace for a few days if you hate ructions so much. If you don't. . .”

Elizabeth noticed with irritation and embarrassment that Juliet had tears in her eyes. She snorted derisively and swept the empty pea-pods and the peelings into the pig bucket and set it down too hard, so that something in it cracked.

“Of course I don't want to act out of fear," said Juliet. "I don't _know_ what I want. I want to stay here with you and Laura and I don't want to stay here. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Finish those potatoes,” said Elizabeth quietly. “You've wasted enough time as it is.”

“I'm sorry to be such a goose,” Juliet wound part of her apron around her hand and rubbed ferociously at her nose. “I'll have to do better if I'm going to be a Queen's scholar. Doesn't that sound stupid? Elizabeth, did you ever feel so full of thoughts it was like a flock of birds trying to fly out of your chest?”

“I certainly hope not.”

“It's a _horrible_ feeling,” said Juliet. She made another graceful girdle of peel with her knife. “Not horrible, I mean. I don't know why I keep using that word. Charlotte Porter started calling everything horribly this or that a couple months ago, and now _everyone_ says it. It's like the plague.”

Elizabeth laughed the small, colourless laugh she reserved for foolish things whose foolishness was of no great consequence. “When I was a girl, we were expected to keep control of our tongues, regardless of who said what when. You might do well to do the same.”

Juliet turned her head upward in a way that reminded Elizabeth of the little stepmother, though she could not have had time to learn it from her – that same tenderly curious, uncertain tilt.

“What were you like as a girl?” she said.

 

Father didn't hold with modern foolishness about children. Nothing about man's nature had changed since the days of Eve, and it was vanity to follow the winding currents of the times. Archibald Murray's children would keep the hours he had, learn the prayers and Nursery Songs from his own books with their funny old-fashioned pictures of children surprised by death, light candles at dusk, be himself, but many.

There was a boy in Father's old picture-book who sneaked off on Sundays to go fishing; on his way up to the loft with his catch, he fell and maimed himself on a meat-hook. There was a girl who loved her finery that much, she ran away from her nurse at the park (in the Old Country children had nurses and parks); she was snatched up and stripped by beggars and set to begging. The good children died and were folded up to heaven in clouds of deep velvet; the bad children lived on to the full span of life, maimed and wasted, to serve as lessons to Elizabeth and her brothers and sisters.

With Juliet it was different. There was a new one-room school in Blair Water, that it would have been beneath Murray standards not to send her to, and all the dangers that went along with it. He might put his foot down about Sunday-school picnics – a disgusting blasphemy to pretend that sparking and stuffing your mouth with sweets had anything to do with religion – and keep up instruction at home, but there had been a change. Juliet learned the Sunday books and how to make white cake by Mary Murray's recipe, but she was not like the others and she could not be made like them. She was polite and old-fashioned with her elders, and awkward among her schoolmates, and she dressed as neatly as anyone could wish. When she sat with her family in the Murray pew, she looked just like one of them: a long neck and pale hair under a crisp dark cap, a back as straight as the Lombardy pines. But the old books were just books to her, and the Murray ways were clothes she could put on like a smock and take off when she left by the kitchen door. For all her shelter and instruction, for all she was their sister, she was a child of the gentle Seventies, alien to them in ways neither she nor they could quantify or change.

Elizabeth thought privately that it was a mistake to have children so late in life. If she found it strange and difficult to talk to her half-sister at a distance of twenty years, how much worse must it be when it was sixty? But the thing was done, and it was not for her to question the will that made it.

“I sat up straight and didn't chatterbox,” she said, “and I didn't dawdle over potatoes as if there were no such thing as time.”

“By the time I ever knew you, you were grown up. Did you and Ruth and Laura ever sit up telling secrets? Did you get into horrible-- ugh! Awful fights, I mean. You know, I don't even _like_ Charlotte Porter. I honestly don't. It just _happened.”_

She fell to contemplating the potatoes, or the perils of language. Elizabeth let the silence fall. She finished the peas and cut four of the remaining potatoes in quick succession, and when she spoke again it was almost a murmur.

“I was never a girl,” she said. “Not the way you are. There was no school in Blair Water then, and we kept to ourselves on the farm. We didn't have such a long time to trade soap cards or other nonsense. There was no Queen's College. I learned how to be useful and then I was useful.”

Juliet cut the last potato into tiny squares.

“You didn't have an Elizabeth,” she said. “I mean, there was no one to go ahead of you with a lamp, was there?”

“You're too inquisitive for your own good,” said Elizabeth. “You said yourself no one likes to be pestered with silly questions.”

“Did Mr. Adams tell you what I wrote in my essay?"

Elizabeth sniffed. The sniff seemed to jostle her into place, and return her to her ordinary voice, which was like a smooth wooden beam or a small knife in cold air. “Will you go and fetch water for these, _quickly_ ,” she said, “and put the scraps in the pig's trough. It's getting late to be starting the stove up.”

"I said Elizabeth Murray is the kind of woman I would want to be if I were not at all a silly goose. Of course, I put it better than that – there was all kinds of language to it."

Elizabeth brushed her hands on her cap-sleeved apron. She stood on her toes and reached up to untie one of the hams that dangled just above the row of currant jellies, turning her back to signify the conversation had ended. 

"I don't know if he told you. He should have told you, because it must sound horribly-- I mean, it's all wrong for _me_ to say it. I should have waited till you saw it in the papers.” She leaned in the doorway with the empty saucepan pressed between her body and the door-frame, searching for some sign on Elizabeth's face that she was happy or flattered. Elizabeth moved the bowl of peas to a shelf in the pantry and was brushing the table hard with a rag made from one of Juliet's old baby gowns.

"Juliet," she said severely. "Are you going to explain to Father and Laura why supper is late?

“If you want me to go to Queen's, I'll go," said Juliet, speaking almost too quickly to be understood. "It's not that I don't want to go. Only it's-- awful, isn't it? It's awful to go away and be a stranger, and get taught things, and then everything is different when you come back, and who knows what kind of person you might turn into? I don't know what I mean. I wish I could have known you back then.”

She hung in the door, watching the back of Elizabeth's head, as though waiting for some right phrase to come into her mouth and set everything clear and free that was beating anxious wings within her.

Then she was gone, before Elizabeth could scold her for lagging, and soon the sound of the pump came singing in through the kitchen door, high and sad. Elizabeth lit the stove, swept out the floor with the little ragged broom, and turned back toward the white cloud wall of her days.


End file.
